The Cold War Takes a Holiday, 1969–

1976
ASSERTING CONTROL OF FOREIGN POLICY

2023

Americans had denied the split between the Soviet Union and China,
and Secretary of State Dean Rusk explained that the United States
fought in Vietnam to meet the threat of “a billion Chinese armed
with nuclear weapons.”

Abstract
The excessive commitment of American power in Vietnam prevented the United States from
responding to other changes in the world balance. For years, Americans had denied the split
between the Soviet Union and China, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk explained that the
United States fought in Vietnam to meet the threat of “a billion Chinese armed with nuclear
weapons.” By 1969, however, with China convulsed in a “Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution,” American diplomats no longer ignored the fact that the People’s Republic went
its own way. American and Soviet influence seemed to ebb in the rest of the world too. This
“diffusion of power,” as Johnson’s undersecretary of state Eugene Rostow called it, reflected
the changes in the world’s economy. No longer did the United States sit alone as the world’s
only wealthy country, as it had at the end of the Second World War. There was nothing
Nixon could do to restore American economic dom-

Findings
By 1977, the nations from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf absorbed 39 percent of all
military sales, more than the purchases of the NATO and Warsaw Pact countries combined

A total social breakdown ensued, and as many as three million innocent people, nearly 40
percent of the population, were starved to death by the new government

“Peace is at hand,” Kissinger assured a press conference, and a week later Nixon rode the
euphoria of the war’s end to a crushing defeat of McGovern. He carried every state but
Massachusetts and captured nearly 61 percent of the vote

Salvador Allende Gossens, the candidate of an alliance of Socialists, Communists, and

radicals, had been elected president of one of the most thriving democracies of Latin
America in 1970 with about 36 percent of the vote in a three-candidate race
Despite the hostility of international business, Allende’s government actually increased its
share of the popular vote in the 1972 congressional elections, where leftist candidates
gained 42 percent of the vote

By June, 55 percent of the public thought that Nixon should resign or be impeached

The shah’s government spent 25 percent of its budget on the longest weapons shopping list
in the world

Scholarcy Highlights
 Nixon’s first object in the Vietnam War was to silence domestic and foreign critics
 Americans had denied the split between the Soviet Union and China, and Secretary of
State Dean Rusk explained that the United States fought in Vietnam to meet the threat of
“a billion Chinese armed with nuclear weapons.”
 Nixon told Thieu that American troops no longer could be as obtrusive in the war, that
American forces had to be withdrawn with the South Vietnamese soldiers doing more of
the fighting
 Despite its promise of reducing American participation in overseas conflicts, the Nixon
Doctrine changed little in the way the United States dealt with other lands
 Lyndon Johnson had always resisted the expansion of the war beyond Vietnam, but
Nixon and Kissinger believed that a “sideshow” in Cambodia would keep the generals
happy while the United States brought troops home
 The United States had separated the military from the political aspects of the war by
permitting the North Vietnamese and the Provisional Revolutionary Government to
work out the best deal they could with the Thieu government

Scholarcy Summary

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Richard Nixon had no secret plan for ending the war in Vietnam, but he knew what he did
not like.

French president Charles de Gaulle assured fellow Europeans that the war in Vietnam
hastened the day when “the Americans would no longer have any reason to stay on this side
of the ocean.”.

The excessive commitment of American power in Vietnam prevented the United States from
responding to other changes in the world balance.

American and Soviet influence seemed to ebb in the rest of the world too

This “diffusion of power,” as Johnson’s undersecretary of state Eugene Rostow called it,
reflected the changes in the world’s economy.
No longer did the United States sit alone as the world’s only wealthy country, as it had at the
end of the Second World War. There was nothing Nixon could do to restore American
economic dom-.

U.S DIPLOMACY SINCE 1900 inance, but he reasoned that extrication from Vietnam would
provide greater maneuverability in a competitive world

ASSERTING CONTROL OF FOREIGN POLICY

Nixon’s first object in the Vietnam War was to silence domestic and foreign critics. perhaps,
government could govern without having to answer opponents it could never satisfy.

Nixon’s style of making foreign policy—his dramatic reversals, his reliance on trusted staff
members, and his sanctimony—helped lower the rhetoric over Vietnam

His collaboration with National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger set the tone.

On the first day of the new administration, Kissinger seized control of the planning function
for the National Security Council by demanding in THE COLD WAR TAKES A HOLIDAY,
1969–1976 the president’s name that all policy papers receive clearance from him and his
staff.

He bombarded the State, Defense, and Treasury departments with requests for information.

He set up special working groups to coordinate policies on Vietnam, southern Africa, and
the Middle East

LIQUIDATING VIETNAM
Nixon took a visible part in setting a new course. In May 1969, he met South Vietnamese
president Nguyen Thieu on the island of Midway to discuss the future of the war.

While the United States gradually reduced the troop level from five hundred thirty-five
thousand to four hundred thousand over the year and American casualties fell from over
three hundred men to under one hundred men killed a week, the air war increased.

Lyndon Johnson had always resisted the expansion of the war beyond Vietnam, but Nixon
and Kissinger believed that a “sideshow” in Cambodia would keep the generals happy while
the United States brought troops home.

A proud nationalist who worried that the United States, Vietnam, and China each had
designs on his land, the prince had tried, not always successfully, to stay aloof from the war
in Vietnam

He closed his eyes to North Vietnamese troops in his land while at the same time uttering no
protest when American B-52s bombed them.

The Japanese economy had, boomed during the Vietnam War as the United States used that
nation’s facilities to repair equipment
AN OPENING TO CHINA
Nixon moved in 1971 and 1972 to isolate Vietnam from China and the Soviet Union,
reasoning that if the North Vietnamese lost their major backers they would make peace on
America’s terms.

The press reported that the national security adviser had a stomachache, and the day he
showed up in the Chinese capital to announce that the president of the United States would
be coming to China to open “normal” relations between the two countries.

Kissinger kept control of American policy toward the India-Pakistan war

He told the president, “I can’t turn it over to Rogers.

The two pledged to President Richard Nixon with Mao Zedong, chairman of the Chinese
Communist party, in Beijing, February 1972.

The Shanghai communiqué, announced at the end of the meeting, indicated that the United
States recognized that both Chinese governments claimed that Taiwan was part of China,
and that the Untied States acknowledged the Beijing government as the sovereign power in
China.

“Deep six Rogers,” the president commanded as he ordered Kissinger to explain the
implications of the agreements with the People’s Republic

WHITE HOUSE ABUSES

While Kissinger decried leaks from NSC staff, other Nixon aides were appalled by certain
stories in the press.

In June 1971, Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon analyst who had cast off his hawkish ideas
on the war, turned over copies of the special Pentagon history of the Vietnam War to Neil
Sheehan of the New York Times.

Ehrlichman, created a White House “plumbers” unit to plug leaks of embarrassing

information

Their first stop was a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist to find discrediting
information.

Soon the plumbers cast a wider net

By the fall, they were following one Dita Beard, a lobbyist for the International Telephone
and Telegraph Company, who had slipped documents to Jack Anderson suggesting that her
company had paid $500,000 to the president’s reelection campaign in return for help
around the world, especially in Chile.

The Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate office complex in

Washington appeared on Hunt’s ridiculous agenda.
While attempting to do so, they were apprehended at the building complex on the night of
June 18, 1972

DETENTE WITH THE SOVIET UNION

That “third-rate burglary,” as Nixon’s press secretary, Ronald Ziegler, dismissed it, created
barely a stir in the summer of 1972 as Nixon successfully relaxed tensions with the Soviet
Union.

(Mao had shown how much of a revolutionary he was by embracing President Nixon!)
Economically, the Soviet Union could gain immensely by opening trade relations with the
United States.

The snag in the negotiations arose from objections by South Vietnamese president Thieu to
a peace settlement which would have the United States remove the last of its troops while
the North Vietnamese agreed only not to introduce any new forces in the South.

The United States had separated the military from the political aspects of the war by
permitting the North Vietnamese and the Provisional Revolutionary Government to work
out the best deal they could with the Thieu government.

The United States had resisted the calls to depose Thieu, but still the South Vietnamese
president did not want to face the armies of his enemies alone.

When asked about the morality of the overthrow of a duly elected democratic government,
Kissinger replied that he saw no “right for people to vote in Communists” since presumably
once they were in power they never left

THE MIDDLE EAST WAR

Maintaining American domination over the Western Hemisphere came easier than asserting
influence in the Middle East.

Nixon authorized an airlift of replacement arms and ammunition to Israel on October 21

Sure that they could receive additional supplies from the Americans, the Israelis committed
the remainder of their equipment and turned the tide.

They threw the Syrians back beyond the original line of the Golan Heights, and they crossed
the Suez Canal and surrounded the Egyptian Third Army.

His approval rating stood at a minuscule 23 percent

Believing that his success at arranging detente with the Soviet Union retained some support
among a public that believed the new vice-president, Gerald Ford, lacked the stature to
continue diplomacy, Nixon traveled to the Middle East and Moscow in June.

That fall he revived his shuttle between Syria and Jerusalem

THE OIL EMBARGO AND IRAN
The most advanced airplanes in America’s arsenal—225 F-4s, 41 F-5s, 80 F-14s, 160 F-16s,
and over 900 helicopters—went to Iran accompanied by five thousand military instructors
for their use

Another forty thousand civilians went to the oil-drenched country to build the telephone
system, construct modern airports and seaports, and operate the petroleum fields and
refineries.

They lived in ranch-style houses in isolated American colonies, bought imported food at
familiar-looking supermarkets, refused to learn Farsi, the local language, and sowed seeds
of nationalist resentment.

At the same time nearly one hundred thousand Iranian students, supported by their
nation’s oil profits, enrolled in technical courses at universities in the United States.

They blamed the shah’s government for corruption, arrogance, and surveillance of their
personal activities and enlisted in the opposition to the monarch’s rule

THE END IN VIETNAM

Lost in the excitement of presidential and secretarial travel and the fall of Richard Nixon
was the continuing war in Southeast Asia, which reached a climax in the spring of 1975.

In early 1975, Ford asked Congress for an additional billion in aid in South Vietnam, Laos,
and Cambodia.

When it became obvious that Saigon would fall, thousands of employees of the Americans
feared for their lives at the hands of vindictive Communists.

They crashed the gates at the American embassy in Saigon, demanding visas to enter the
United States.

In Washington, the fall of Southeast Asia was greeted with recriminations from Ford and
Kissinger, who blamed Congress for not providing more aid.

They made use of the Cambodian seizure of the American cargo vessel Mayaguez on May 12
to demonstrate their continued toughness.

A week after the Mayaguez rescue, President Ford received a standing ovation from
students at the University of Pennsylvania, formerly a center of antiwar demonstrations

COMING TO TERMS WITH VIETNAM

As the first war the United States clearly lost, the Vietnam debacle produced an anguished
emotional response among politicians, diplomats, and observers looking for ways to avoid
future entanglements.
President Ford appointed his own task force, chaired by newly named Vice-President
Nelson Rockefeller, to look into intelligence activities and quiet Congress

While none of these investigations aroused the intense public attention the earlier
Watergate or impeachment hearings had created, they did build a case that foreign policy
since the Second World War had often gone down a second, secret track, outside the
scrutiny of public, Congress, or the State Department.

When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, he characterized the Vietnam War as a
“noble cause.”

He argued that the only mistake the United States had made in Vietnam had been timidity in
the use of military force.

Reagan and his more conservative supporters decried what they characterized as a
“Vietnam syndrome,” the reluctance to use America’s military power to achieve its foreign
policy ends.

Findings
By 1977, the nations from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf absorbed 39 percent of all
military sales, more than the purchases of the NATO and Warsaw Pact countries combined.

“Peace is at hand,” Kissinger assured a press conference, and a week later Nixon rode the
euphoria of the war’s end to a crushing defeat of McGovern.

He carried every state but Massachusetts and captured nearly 61 percent of the vote.

Salvador Allende Gossens, the candidate of an alliance of Socialists, Communists, and

radicals, had been elected president of one of the most thriving democracies of Latin
America in 1970 with about 36 percent of the vote in a three-candidate race.

Despite the hostility of international business, Allende’s government increased its share of
the popular vote in the 1972 congressional elections, where leftist candidates gained 42
percent of the vote.

The shah’s government spent 25 percent of its budget on the longest weapons shopping list
in the world

ASSERTIVE OUTBURSTS AFTER VIETNAM

The search for a place to show American resolve continued in 1975, and the site selected
was one of the most remote in the world, the southwest African country of Angola, formerly
a colony of Portugal.

He chided the style of Kissinger’s diplomacy for its flamboyance and sudden shifts,
suggesting that he would be more attuned to the needs of America’s allies
He supported the arms treaties negotiated with the Soviets but intimated that the
Republicans had taken insufficient interest in human rights violations in the Soviet bloc.

Carter’s apparent sincerity, his promise “I’ll never lie to you,” and his ostentatious
Christianity won many supporters early in the campaign; late August polls showed him
ahead of Ford by more than thirty percentage points

Disillusionment with both candidates set in as voters had to decide whether, in Arthur
Schlesinger’s words, to choose a candidate afflicted with the “dumbness factor” (Ford) or
the “weirdness factor” (Carter).

A new administration came to town vowing to put Vietnam behind the United States, open a
dialogue between the rich and the poor nations, recapture the American commitment to
human rights, place the Soviet Union on the defensive, and reduce the American role as the
major arms supplier to the world